Adventure Time: Pirates of the Enchiridion (2018)

I'm not the hugest fan of AT, I've seen most of the show and do enjoy it a lot, but this game??? sucks!

It's just poorly made on a basic technological level, there are frame rate dips NOTICEABLE FRAME RATE DIPS, the game literally CRASHED outright like 3 mins in, there are loading screens everywhere, the controls are sluggish and loose. The world is cute enough looking, but everything feels off because of the game's instability. Gameplay is whatever, it's a licensed game, the gameplay is never why you or I have ended up here. The characters and story are passable, not as good as in the show but whatever. If this wasn't such a hot mess I would give it a 2 or even a 3 possibly but damn the game code on this thing is rotted.

Pirates of the Enchiridion is easily one of the worst games I’ve ever played. If I were Pendleton Ward, I’d be pissed someone did this with my IP. Nearly every aspect of the game is riddled with bugs and performance issues. I experienced numerous glitches and freezes that made me force quit and restart, losing progress every time because the game doesn’t have a manual save and the auto save is absolutely unreliable at best.

There’s so much wrong I’m not even sure where to begin. Here’s a bulleted list.

• I would guess nearly a quarter of the game is loading screens
• Zero incentive to explore. Maybe incentive is the wrong word. More like, the game doesn’t encourage or hint for you to go check things outside of the plot objectives, because it doesn’t really indicate there is reason to do so, or that much more is even out there. I assumed I’d get to go everywhere through the story, but I was wrong.
• The game is over before it starts. Maybe 7 hours? I was gathering supplies, grinding and getting money to boost stats and abilities, and I didn’t have to.
• Related to the above, I missed out on a few abilities for every character except Jake, just by happenstance, and it made no difference. Marceline’s normal attack did about as much damage as Finn’s Ice Sword special. BMO spent every turn boosting special ability meter, and Jake got in some decent AOE damage. Every character can use items before they take another action, so every battle was attack, use one of two abilities, heal when needed, repeat. Every single fight.
• Everything is horribly glitchy. I’d clip through stairs, jump and get stuck on a mailbox or treasure chest or something, fall through the ground into oblivion, would randomly lose pick-up-ables. Fights would freeze. The game would crash and I’d load my save to find out some of what I did or collected was still completed, but other things were not. I could go on for much longer.
• Graphics are just okay. The last villain looks nice?
• Audio stinks. Weird clipping and delay in the voices and sound effects, music is really lacking throughout. The locations have some more environmental sounding loops, there’s some fighting music, that’s about it.
• Huge lack of characters from the series.
• No humor.
• Little in the way of exploration in each area, and exploration is a pain in the ass due to slow movement speed, issues with the maps, really awkward toggling in and out of the map, and even the most basic areas felt like a chore to get through. I really struggled with just getting around in this.

I got this on sale for $5.99, which is too much for this unfinished pile of shit. Don’t play it, even if you’re a fan of the show. Especially if you’re a fan of the show, because it’s just one huge disappointment.